March 21, 2006

I love it when I feel like I'm a couple of days behind the news, that there is more going on than I could possibly draw.

That happened last week with the Garfield Affair.

It wasn't my favorite kind of governmental malfeasance, a sex scandal, or my second favorite, monitary fraud. It was an information scandal, an inside job, a double standard, the good old boys and girls just being themselves like in the old days, when Rowland politically died for their sins.

I looked in our top-secret files for a picture of Jeffrey B. Garfield, the state elections enforcement guy, but I couldn't find a picture I liked. Then it dawned on me that nobody, except maybe his family and friends, knows what he looks like anyway, so why bother?

That decision led me to my second favorite Garfield (President James Garfield is my first) -- Garfield the cat, the second largest industry in Muncie, Ind. General Electric is the first.

When I put Garfield the cat behind that desk, it all came together. Garfield the cat hates spiders and loves birds, mostly as dessert after a nice bowl of lasagna. The only thing I had to figure out is what he ate.

Did he eat democracy? No. Did he eat election reform? Not yet.

This is where I have to pare things down, cut through the obfuscation, cut to the essence.

What he did was show us how some things have not yet changed, even in Snow White's government. It's still about who you know, not what you know, shortcuts, heads-up politics, insider info. This is the kind of stuff in the business world that Martha Stewart went to the slammer for.

I used Garfield's own words to embarrass him. Yes, Jeffrey, you made a mistake, the kind of mistake too commonly made in this state government. The kind of mistake that gave us the nickname "Corrupticut."